For Good or Bad, These Are Men and Women of Action!

Films about dudes doing deeds.

Apr 21, 2025

Still from *The Ballad of Straw-Hat Sam*

Dear Moviegoers,

Finally, after a bit of a hiatus, I’ve come up from under my rock to present some new movie reviews. I’ll always enjoy doing this, and will continue for years.

Some developments to report:

I wrote some mini-coverage of the Overlook Film Festival at Big Easy Magazine, and will keep a column there that will publish every other week.
If you watch Fox 44 out of Baton Rouge every Monday morning, you may have seen my vision doing reviews of movies that feature dogs. Capital K-9s is on YouTube too, so check it out!
Hubspot has some certification programs for SEO and marketing that I'‘ve been taking to both spruce up my resume and potentially begin a small portfolio to present for paid writing projects. Maybe this venture can be called “neaux content” or something.
While Slamdance and Unnamed Footage Fest are well over by now, I still have some flicks from them that I want to make y’all aware of. Coming soon.
All things considered in America today, I’d like to publish movie-adjacent articles about policy and history. If y’all have any recommendations for topics and films, let me know at binxmoviegoer@duck.com.

And now, the pictures.

Presently featured on its website and playing on a repeated loop, the short film Hi! You Are Currently Being Recorded, premiering on April 20th of all days (smoke them if you got them), is the perfect execution of post-toke paranoia. Take a puff, enjoy the vibes, and feel followed for the rest of the day. Makes sense.

The story is simple enough, about a foreign female out-of-towner who, while trying to enjoy a joint and a neighborhood walk, is stalked rather aggressively by invasive warning signs and audible surveillance camera freak outs. Not used to America, the land of the suspicious and the home of the judgmental, this woman gets a full dose of “No Trespassing!” straight to the face, with no people around to assist and no end in sight.

Of course there wouldn’t be anyone else strolling with her in the film, going for a relaxing walk in the sun. In this fairly well-to-do looking neghborhood, where signs point out laws and regulations plus make demands and requests, where cameras politely make one aware of their presence and where helicopters hover from high above, there’s no room for joy. No room for a smoke. No room to breathe. Get back inside, dammit.

Hi! You Are Currently Being Recorded is no found footage flick as I thought it might be, though it does shift from standard narrative perspective to stranger point-of-view often, perhaps expressing what the woman is imagining all around her. Is she being followed at all? Of course. By a person? By time. If she’s recorded, then whoever has that video file can watch her later and forever, to do anything they wish with the images.

No person is safe from invasive technology, even if it’s legally allowed. Terms & conditions. Simply sensory and occasionally anxiety inducing, the film is more thoughtful than scary, its implications no more terrifying than the day before. But, puff puff give, it’s a movie that gets at one very important notion - that this surveillance state has everyone stuck in time. As the tech evolves, people just simmer in fear. Smoking pot does/doesn’t help, but I’d rather have it than not. 3.5/5

Set against the American commercial tree planting industry in the early 2010s, A Thousand Pines traverses multiple states over roughly three quarters of a full year, and the Mexican migrant labor who make this trip. This documentary is not unlike others of its ilk, focusing on a few individuals, learning about their dreams and dire straits, how out of country work affects them and their families, etc. Where it differs from the others is in the intimacy and solidarity that it shares with its subjects.

Solidarity in the more empathetic sense, of course. We can all relate to hard work and long hours, and the noble tasks of doing so for the well being of loved ones. A Thousand Pines shows the human face and the laborious toll of such tasks, sticking with a crew of rural Mexican men who’ve made a work visa deal to cover the United States in pine seedlings for between $500 and $600 per week, during a tenure that spans quite the time away from home. What does this do to a man?

Dig a hole, place a seedling, stomp it down, do it again - thousands of times every day. Some get stuck with splinters, trucks break down here and there, language barriers become a burden, and fixing food in motel make-shift kitchenettes (bathrooms usually) every evening. Is there time to wind down? To have joy? To phone home? Yes, yes, and yes. Never too broken and beaten down, the men use pre-paid phone cards to handle family issues like utility and doctor bills via wire transfer (“Wal-Mart isn’t open at this hour”) and to check in on kids. They listen to music and enjoy sports on tv. The little things mean a lot.

It never gets into the political, at least not in a big or obvious way. Explanations of their limited visas come up, but it’s all so second language to them. They’re used to it and know where to go. However, A Thousand Pines was a decade ago, and much has “changed” since then. I worry about their stories as they are now, and I hope for their prosperity.

This is a movie that’s always moving in more ways than one. The pace is fine, and the resonance to the men’s plight is finer. A documentary that’s like a hymn for community and better tomorrows. I like these kind of movies, and I wish more of these were made. Can a petition be made for congress to host a screening? That’d be nice. 4/5

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In the vast catalog of vulgar adult animation, The Ballad of Straw-Hat Sam will sit alongside the rest as a fairly funny and infinitely immature idea, born from those who enjoy a little bit of liquor, aka “the sauce.” There’s nothing to it but to do it in this film of fourth-wall-breaking serendipity, where violent but overall cool regular guys venture forth on an absurd journey for some great-tasting and legendary bourbon. This is not a film of nuance and easter eggs, but rather blunt objects and f-bombs.

Straw-Hat Sam comes across a writer he names Bucket (due to his own hat), and gains a sidekick in the process. The two face riddles, ghosts, beasts, and gore on their path to get a sip of some delicious bourbon. Body parts are dismembered, awkward lines from a lite edition of South Park are spoken, and crude animation wanders across real video backgrounds in this tome of adventure and creation and recklessness.

Thankfully, the film knows when to end, as it’s barely feature-length and anything more than fifty minutes would’ve been unwelcome. The Ballad of Straw-Hat Sam is enjoyable enough and creative through and through; it’s just that its shenanigans run dry in a gulf of awfully simplistic goofs. Granted, simplistic doesn’t mean bad, but here, it means underwhelming.

Still, there is a shine to the movie that compelled my attention. It has artistry and careful craft, and even gets inventive with some live-action actors who come and go often. I trust that the filmmakers will keep making cartoons and pushing the genre’s buttons—so long as their attitudes never give out. Never forget where you came from, guys. And never forget to cuss every other sentence. 3/5

Astonishing. An ascending achievment. This is how I would describe Michael Townsend and crew’s artistic, adventurous, and amazingly dangerous escapade of building an apartment hangout space in a large operating mall. The fact that they were able to keep this project hidden and evolving for a few years is so straight up shocking, I’m jealous of what they did. Corporate takeover of city cultural spaces be damned, Secret Mall Apartment is one of the best films of the year.

It’s a kind of reverse heist flick, using incredible archival footage that was captured on tiny consumer grade non-video cameras to show how things came to be, how things grew, how things were used, and how things fell down. A treasure trove of anti-establishment re-development, Secret Mall Apartment isn’t merely a how-to or a what happened document of a sliver of time in early 2000s Rhode Island, as it’s also a biography of artist Michael Townsend himself.

Townsend is shown as this dream machine of a craftsman, using real spaces for realer expressions of interpretation and truth that are often temporary but always memorable. His apartment piece was used like a hub for other projects, to be used as a means to another means to an end. Bringing in cinderblocks, one by one, were used to create a wall that fully furnished this hidden but brilliant masterstroke. It’s breathtaking to the point of panic how Towsend’s team not only problem solved the mission but pulled it all off—at least for a time.

Pushing an armoir up a ladder into a dingy and dark spot, having gotten through security and public eyes, is almost too much work for…what? Secret Mall Apartment is about the charm and the fanciful ideas that make life great. That explain the times of which we live in. That relay what art means to the artist and the world as a whole. A documentary with such access and such a story to tell deserves kudos and accolades that are neverending.

Before the internet dominated our lives, after a terrorist attack changed America, and while consumerism continued to invade and destroy, a group of misfits just did their thing, through gumption and action.

Phew. 5/5